Business Desk :
Buoyed by a surge in interest in coffee farming that had a modest beginning in the Chattogram Hill Tracts back in the 1990s, Bangladesh plans large-scale commercial production of coffee beans.
Coffee farming has spilled beyond the rolling hills into the vast swathes of Nilphamari, Tangail and Moulvibazar.
The Department of Agricultural Extension or DAE and Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute or BARI are spending Tk 2 billion on separate projects to promote the cultivation of the non-traditional cash crop. Farmers are being trained up while research is being carried out on the local coffee species and the new technology in coffee farming.
BARI is confident about exporting coffee once the commercial farming takes off, reports bdnews24.com.
Currently, two types of coffee are cultivated in Bangladesh. One is Robusta made from beans of the plant Coffea Canephora, an African species, while the other is Coffea Arabica, also known as mountain coffee.
The coffee shrubs differ in size and harvest based on the hilly sites. On average, a hectare of land yields 7.5 to 11 tonnes of Robusta coffee, while three to six tonnes of Arabica is grown in each hectare.
A total of 395 Robusta plants yield 3.16 tonnes of coffee beans, according to Hill Tracts Agricultural Research Centre.
Though they have not started full-fledged coffee farming, farmers in Rangamati are growing fond of it, said Altaf Hossain, chief scientific officer in Rangamati Raikhali Agricultural Research Centre. The research centre has more than 150 seedlings of the two types of coffee plants. Amateur farmers collect the plants only for Tk 20 apiece.
Farmers are getting increasingly interested in the cultivation of coffee besides that of fruits like mango, orange, jackfruit, banana and pineapple as the wild plant can be successfully cultivated in the garden if proper irrigation is ensured, said Paban Kumar Chakma, director of DAE, Rangamati region.
As many as 473 farmers have begun cultivating coffee on 122.9 hectares of land in seven Upazilas of Bandarban, said Omar Faruk, agriculture officer of Bandarban Sadar Upazila. They harvested 56.25 tonnes of coffee beans from 104,589 plants last year.
Cultivation of Coffea Arabica has been a hit with the people in Bandarban, according to Faruk, with most of the farmers coming from Ruma Upazila.
At least 350 farmers in Ruma harvested 39.15 tonnes of coffee beans from 29,544 plants on 48 hectares of land. They took to coffee farming in the hills 20 years ago as a test case. Now the farmers in the hills have embraced the cultivation of the cash crop, claimed officials at Khagrachhari Hill Agriculture Research Centre.
